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CLAS414: CONCEPTS OF ART & LITERATURE FROM HOMER TO ARISTOTLE
Today, all over the world, Greek dramas continue to be performed and adapted; Homer's epics are forever finding new audiences through new translations, adaptations and interpretation on film and TV; and Greek art attracts millions of people worldwide to galleries, museums and archaeological sites. But what did these visual and verbal art-forms mean to the ancients themselves? What was the (perceived) impact of these media and how were they imagined to affect onlookers, readers and hearers? Answers to these and other related questions can be found in looking at extensive ancient writings about the visual and verbal arts in Archaic and Classical Greece. This multi-disciplinary course analyses Greek views of visual imagery (primarily paintings and statues), poetry and rhetoric of the Archaic and Classical Greek world (c. 750-320 BC) within such writings, which cast light on the role of Greek literature and art in their cultural context.

By focusing on texts from the eighth to the fourth centuries BC, this course illuminates the richness of early Greek ideas about visual art and literature down to and including Plato and Aristotle, whose views remain influential, but whose status as founders of western aesthetics has been challenged in recent years.  This course also shows how ancient literary and aesthetic criticism embraced other issues central to Greek speculative thought: psychology, sense perception, ethics and emotion, poetics, rhetoric and erotic desire.  The early Greek reception of artworks and literature thus emerges as an important strand of ancient intellectual history and deepens our understanding of what Greek art and literature could mean to its public, ancient and modern alike.